Aboriginal people with dementia spend their twilight years on traditional country

Winnie Coppin is a little unsteady on her feet, but she is determined to make it down the dirt track to look out over the picturesque coastline where she grew up.

The 82-year-old uses a walking stick to navigate the soft sands, and talks quietly about why this country is so important to her.

"It is a good spot around here, all the fishes come in."

Winnie Coppin is warm and likeable and beams when she smiles. She can also be vague and forgetful. The Nyangumarta elder has dementia, but lives in a part of Australia where services are limited and the condition is poorly understood.

"Some of the people here, they do not really understand what dementia is," explains local support worker Faye Dean.

"They cannot see the illness so they do not think it is there, they think it is a put on, [that] you are pretending."

Ms Dean — who cared for her own mother as she struggled with dementia — recounts a horrific story of an old man who died several years earlier.

"This one old fella, he used to walk around with his little dog and everyone knew he was old, but then one day he just wandered off into the bush and we never saw him again.

"That was because of dementia and the effects it had on him, but no one knew how he was feeling [or] what he was going to do."

Memories of being 'painted black'

Winnie Coppin has extraordinary memories that pour forth when she is surrounded by familiar faces — stories of early pastoralism and mining and her close escape from becoming one of the Stolen Generations.

As a child she remembers her mother rubbing black paint onto her skin, to protect her "half-caste" daughter from the prying eyes of the welfare authorities.

"My dad went to war and never made it back," Ms Coppin said.

"My mum took me away from the white people. They wanted to take me away; they had stolen kids before.

"We all went [into] the bush, [Mum] put the black paint on me, then [we] came back to camp at night-time."

For now, Ms Coppin's family is just happy that she can stay in Bidyadanga, close to the cattle station where she was born, and speaking in Nyangumarta to her old friends.